COMMENTARY If President Trump hopes to replicate Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's authoritarian conquest of the judicary, tiny El Salvador may have a large effect on America's democratic future.
We once hoped America was the future of El Salvador.
Now El Salvador could be the future of America.
Or as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele would say: Oopsie!
That was Bukele’s smart-ass response — the sort of riposte you get from the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” — to U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order last weekend to halt the Trump administration’s deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants.
They were sent to a high-security prison in El Salvador, where the U.S. will pay Bukele’s government millions to house them.
When the flight arrived there in apparent defiance of Boasberg’s directive, Bukele mocked the judge on X: “Oopsie ... Too Late.”
READ MORE: Rubio harps on U.S. democracy — after hugging Salvadoran autocracy
Boasberg feared the Trump Administration was making questionable use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and arbitrarily deeming the Venezuelans “terrorist” members of a violent Venezuelan criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. And Boasberg looks to be right, since many of the deported migrants, according to court records, were tagged as gang members, with no due process, even though they had no criminal history in the U.S. or Venezuela.
But President Trump’s own response has been Bukelean: he’s flipping Boasberg the same middle finger he’s flashed at, say, casino contractors he’s been accused of stiffing over the years. He’s calling the judge “a radical left lunatic.” And he’s demanding his impeachment – as is Trump’s co-president, billionaire Elon Musk.
Now, live from San Salvador, Bukele has upped the ante by declaring, in support of Trump’s middle digit, that the court challenges Trump faces from Boasberg and other judges who dare question his executive prerogatives mean that “the U.S. is facing a judicial coup.”
And that — if you care about the rule of law in the Americas and America’s role-model role in it — is where things get chilling.
Trump is still trying to figure out how to tear down the U.S. judicial branch's independence. His cheerleader Bukele has accomplished it in El Salvador.
That’s because while Trump is still trying to figure out how to tear down the independence of the judicial branch of U.S. government, Bukele has already accomplished it in El Salvador.
Three years ago, after neutering his country’s legislative branch by sending in troops to occupy the Legislative Assembly, Bukele then had the Supreme Court’s justices tossed and replaced with loyal lackeys.
They’ve looked the other way as he’s won unconstitutional re-election and ordered indiscriminate arrests — a sweep that has admittedly reined in El Salvador’s grave gang violence, but which has left as much as 2% of the population incarcerated, often unjustly.
Authoritarian marketing
So I asked Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants in Washington D.C. and a Latin America expert who follows Bukele closely, what effect the Salvadoran leader’s cheerleading for Trump could have here in the U.S.
Farah pointed out that while Bukele rules one of the world’s smallest countries, he enjoys outsize influence because his iron-fisted crackdown on crime has proven popular inside and outside El Salvador.
“Bukele has successfully marketed an authoritarian, deeply anti-democratic model,” Farah wrote to me. “And this is deeply attractive to authoritarians like Trump … who view the rule of law as applicable only to meet their designs.”
In fact, Trump and Trump lieutenants like Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who calls the Salvadoran one of the model “democratic leaders in our hemisphere” — do applaud Bukele.
So to hear him warn of an American “judicial coup” only emboldens Trump to double down on efforts to defy if not dismantle America’s uncooperative judiciary — which is putting up checks-and-balances barriers to his tsunami of executive orders gutting the federal government.
As if that weren’t scary enough — especially given that in the wake of Trump’s attacks on Boasberg, many other federal judges are now receiving online threats — consider the hemispheric effect.
While Bukele’s full-throated endorsement pumps Trump, Trump’s crusade in turn promises to buoy like-minded leaders across Latin America and the Caribbean — who will naturally conclude: Hey, if even el líder yanqui is aping El Salvador, why shouldn’t we?
It would be muscle music to right-wingers like Argentine President and Trump BFF Javier Milei, left-wingers like Colombian President and former guerrilla Gustavo Petro, and any other head of state who's chafing under the pesky inconveniences of separation-of-powers democracy.
Farah warns that Bukele’s short-term autocrat-gratification model risks the long-term “end of the democratic state.”
That certainly looks like El Salvador’s future. And — oopsie! — maybe now America’s.
